Author: Christopher Prendergast
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191527009
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book Here
Book Description
Focusing on a moment and a source in nineteenth-century France, Christopher Prendergast takes up a big question that is still with us: What is a classic? The question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question. It returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 ('Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?'), as it did in the twentieth century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his nineteenth-century context, Prendergast's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the seventeenth and eighteenth as well as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). He also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, The Classic maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. This emphasis was taken up by the extreme right in France after Sainte-Beuve's death, in a determined mobilizing of a version of the 'classic' on behalf of a proto-fascist agenda. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question of our own about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term 'classic' altogether.
Author: North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag
ISBN: 9783823355410
Category : Classicism
Languages : fr
Pages : 512
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Seán Hand
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521495745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris's work. Frequently cited as a central figure in contemporary French culture, Seán Hand explores Leiris's participation in some of the most striking intellectual and artistic movements of the twentieth century; surrealism, ethnography and existentialism. Hand locates his writing in these different contexts in relation to the major artistic, political and philosophical concepts of the period. He goes on to argue that Leiris's multi-volume autobiography stands as the model form of self-enquiry in the twentieth century.
Author: Roger Fowler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134840098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 407
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book, first published in 1987, differs from many other ‘dictionaries of criticism’ in concentrating less on time-honoured rhetorical terms and more on conceptually flexible, powerful terms. Each entry consists of not simply a dictionary definition but an essay exploring the history and full significance of the term, and its possibilities in critical discourse. This title is an ideal basic reference text for literature students of all levels.
Author: Mitchell Greenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521325544
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
Professor Greenberg's lucid study examines the themes of authority, power and sexuality in Corneille's major plays, drawing on the work of Foucault, and Freudian and feminist critics. He begins by considering the question of myth and of a 'pre-historical' cultural memory in Médée, and proceeds to a detailed analysis of each of the four best-known tragedies: Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte. A concluding chapter discusses two middle-period plays and Suréna, Corneille's last tragedy. Professor Greenberg argues that the formal symmetries of classical tragedy reflect a desire for control in the realm of both politics and sexuality. He also seeks to show how these principles of symmetry are challenged or undermined in various ways by the plays themselves. The result is an exacerbation of sexual and political desire which invests Cornelian tragedy with its peculiar power and involves us so deeply in its world.
Author: Jeanne Haight
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Jane Gaines
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822312994
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 366
Get Book Here
Book Description
An overview of film studies
Author: Joseph T. Shipley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040032133
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 828
Get Book Here
Book Description
First published in 1970, Dictionary of World Literary Terms brings together in one volume authoritative definitions of literary terms, forms and techniques, figures of speech and detailed notes on the history and development of the literatures and literary movements of the world. Arranged in alphabetical order for easy use, the entries range from anti-hero to zeugma, from classicism to the New Criticism, and from esoteric or archaic terms to contemporary theatre and poetry. This book will be indispensable for writers, students, scholars, researchers, librarians and everyone who has a literary curiosity.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004485651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
Arising from the activities of the Centre for Seventeenth-Century French Theatre, this volume proposes a selection of eighteen essays by internationally renowned scholars aimed at all those who value and work with the theatre of seventeenth-century France, whether in teaching, research or performance. Frequently seeking out the interfaces of these areas, the essays cover historiography (including that of opera), the theory and practice of textual editing, visualizing – in terms of both theatre architecture and the significance of playtext illustration - , approaches to study and research (including the most recent applications of computer technology), and performance studies which relate the classical canon to contemporary French and other cultures. Always suggesting new directions, challenging the epistemological bases of the very concept of French classical theatre, the essays provide a snapshot of scholarship in the field at the dawn of a new millennium, and offer an ideal opportunity to reassess its past whilst looking to its future.
Author: Elise Noël McMahon
Publisher: Summa Publications, Inc.
ISBN: 9781883479213
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this work Professor McMahon takes a new approach to interpreting the most canonized century in French literature. By viewing literature as essentially a cultural practice, she offers an unconventional reading of canonical masterpieces of the era (Corneille's Medee, Moliere's La Bourgeois gentilhomme, Racine's Phedre, and La Fontaine's Fables) to the extent that these works are compared to "non-literary" texts which focus on the human body. "Classics Incorporated" draws on extensive archival research into such unfamiliar historical sources as cookbooks, shopping guides, treatises on medicine and monstrosity, and dance manuals. Because of this insistence on treating literature as part of a given culture and historicising texts in a novel manner, "Classics Incorporated" stands apart as a critical study that can appeal to a diverse audience: those who are interested in cultural criticism, popular culture, cultural history, and critical theory alike.
